Open Source Values

[Jason Clinton]

On Wednesday 26 January 2005 10:26 am, Charles, Joshua Micah (UMKC-Student) 
wrote:
> A great book on the subject is "The Future Of Ideas," which I also
> highly recommend.  Personally, I can't understand how you can be pro
> "Open-Source," and also for Government Regulations.  They are
> contradictory ideas at their core.

As long as we're talking about open-source as a free market then there's a 
very important difference between open-source and the business world: free 
markets in the business world are very good at everything but keeping 
themselves free; in the open-source community there's no power associated 
with the success of a project and so monopolies that hurt the community are 
not formable.

Also, while in the open-source community there are unlimited intellectual 
resources on which the software ecosystem is built -- that is to say that 
having a developer on your project doesn't deprive anyone else of the ability 
to put food on their table -- in the business world this isn't so.
There are limited physical resources: namely environmental which may be 
exploited and monopolized.

And so, regulation of the business markets are needed. It's also worth 
mentioning that open-source wouldn't exist without regulation -- everything 
would be public domain and who knows what kind of a movement we'd have on our 
hands.

And since I happen to be in these woods, it's tempting to not mention this: if 
physical resources were suddenly as unlimited as intellectual ones, would the 
free market system bring us the beautiful system we see at work in 
open-source? So all we need now is limitless energy and energy-to-matter 
conversion ... anyone have that on their to-do list?

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://kclug.org/pipermail/kclug/attachments/20050126/3968aba4/attachment-0002.pgp